Marketing the motley crew: Trans inclusivity policies are actually promotional incentives

The more "trans inclusive" the culture becomes, the more appealing membership in the trans club becomes. This is a marketing campaign, not a social justice movement.

That little nugget of wisdom is floating around on social meeja. It’s idiotic.

There is no erosion of the human rights of trans people, i.e. the human rights that everyone has. There is no such thing as specifically “trans” rights. There can’t be, because “trans” is a fiction, and because making that particular fiction a basis for rights would obliterate women’s rights as well as lesbian and gay rights. It’s unworkable to make it a “right” for men who pretend to be women to force everyone else to agree. It’s unworkable because it’s not true and it drives a tank through women’s rights.

That’s Ophelia Benson, speaking about the latest meme rippling through the vacuous currents of the transactivist echo chamber.

This recent post of hers set a few thoughts in motion — as her work so often does. In case you haven’t noticed by now, Benson’s blog, Butterflies and Wheels, is my go-to salon — a digital Algonquin Round Table where clever commentary and thoughtful debate reflect the values of liberalism, feminism, humanism, and rational inquiry. For more than a decade, it’s been the first site I check in the morning and the last at night, a daily ritual marked by an embarrassing number of midday refreshes — which tells you everything you need to know about what this intellectual gathering place means to me.

(It has early gender critical cred, too: the late Magdalen Berns was a guest author there in 2016!)

But I digress. Back to the post at hand…

Why do people see things like (for example) the push to let crossdressing football and rugby men bash female players on the pitch and then lather themselves up in the women’s shower after the match as if this is all a new frontier in human rights, instead of what it obviously is: letting the horny hounds off the chain?

By night, crossdresser Giulia (né Marco) Valentino makes hardcore fetish porn and DJs at extreme fetish clubs such as London’s “legendary” Torture Garden. By day, he claims to be a literal woman. In 2022 he joined an Irish women’s soccer league, after which he became an international cause célèbre in the left-wing media, who almost unanimously backed his brazen exploitation of women athletes in pursuit of fetishistic gratification. To this day, ChatGPT and other A.I. bots insist he’s a vulnerable minority — and a supposedly female one at that — rather than the endlessly horny, self-entitled, misogynist man he clearly is.

A big part of the problem stems from people’s mistaken conception of “trans people” as a fixed subset of the population, supposedly analogous to gay people. Those unaccustomed to critical thinking just presume “trans people” are a small group of individuals who were born with an innate and harmless condition that has caused society to persecute and discriminate against them.

But they’re wrong to presume that. In fact, “trans people” are a wide open identity group: “trans” is a social label that anyone is free to adopt anytime, for pretty much any reason, as long as they say they “feel” it’s right for them. The trans contingent has no real or material membership prerequisite, so there’s no fixed limit on how much the group could conceivably grow or shrink. Its size can vary widely based on how appealing a trans identity happens to be at any given time. And very recently, what was once barely a blip became a booming presence, propelled by social media and the political tides of the culture war.

Trans is nothing like homosexuality — the latter of which, because it involves actual, physical sex acts driven by primal, animal instincts, is a much more materially delineated phenomenon whose definition is fairly self-evident and whose boundaries maintain themselves naturally. Being a natural phenomenon, homosexuality also has a remarkable degree of consistency across generations, cultures, economic classes, and other population demographics. “Trans” identity, by contrast, has the fluidity and demographic inconsistency that we see in things like political and religious movements, and in faddish subcultures like hippies and punks. The trans craze is unambiguously a man-made subculture and not a natural phenomenon.

The number of people who loudly announce themselves to be transgender (or who quietly drop the label) is directly dependent on the circumstantial pros and cons of them doing so. Everybody who decides to identify as “trans” does so because it allows them to gain something that they want — or it allows them to avoid something they don’t want. Every time you (the proverbial you, not you you) change a social policy to make it “more trans inclusive,” you’re not easing the burden on a small, fixed group of people who can’t help but be innately “trans” and who would otherwise struggle to cope with their day-to-day lives without the concessions that trans “inclusivity” policies offer. Instead, you’re incentivizing more people who’d otherwise have carried on just fine, to hop aboard the trans bandwagon instead.

Trans “inclusivity” policies are in practice more like trans incentives: intentionally or not, the result is that they serve as promotions for the movement, promising features and perks to draw new members to invest themselves into the tribe by “coming out” as trans. The “coming out” narrative implies that people aren’t signing up to be a part of a new subculture that is rife with cultural cachet, but instead boldly daring to reveal their inner true selves in an act of political courage.

Which is total nonsense.

You can see how and why “trans rights” came to be conflated with gay rights. It was a very clever marketing ploy by the trans activists to hitch their wagon to the gay rights movement. The idea of “coming out” — the act of bravely revealing what was once shamefully hidden — has taken hold of the public's imagination with real cultural bite. But let’s look at what exactly it means to “come out” as gay:

There have always been men and women who, in the privacy of their minds, are far more attracted to members of the same sex. For some, the idea of a relationship with the opposite sex isn’t just unappealing — it's unthinkable, no matter how much pressure they face to conform to heterosexual norms. Others have lived “in the closet,” moving through the motions of heterosexual life, their private longings tucked away — a quiet adaptation to social expectations they felt they couldn’t defy. In any given cultural context, the number of people who come out as gay correlates directly with how welcoming that environment is. Homophobic cultures produce fewer openly gay people; gay-affirming ones, more. But — and this is crucial — the actual number of people who are innately homosexual doesn't change. The point is: it’s an innate human variation, always present, just hidden beneath the surface of society — and unjustly so.

The unjustly part is important, too: it’s not just that gays had private desires, it’s that there was no justifiable reason for them to keep them hidden or to refrain from acting on them publicly. No one has been able to identify any societal drawbacks since lesbians and gays have been legally and culturally incorporated into public society and welcomed to live our homosexual lives out in the open. Thus, the gay rights movement has been a spectacularly successful social justice campaign.

You get the idea.

HOWEVER! The same factor of social injustice cannot necessarily be said to apply to these other groups of “closeted” people:

• There have always been straight men who secretly enjoy crossdressing. If crossdressing was seen as less taboo in society, they’d gladly do so out in the open all the time.

• There have always been straight men who, in the privacy of their minds, find it sexy and appealing to imagine themselves as women. Some of them would go ahead and try to force everyone else to imagine them as women, too, if given the chance to.

• For as long as there have been women’s public locker and shower rooms, there have been men who fantasize about getting naked inside them. You’d be surprised just how far some men would go to get into them. If the social and legal barriers were lessened even a little, a lot more men would elect to go for it.

• There have always been men who prey sexually on children and who dream of having the kind of unsupervised access to children that women are freely granted and that men are prohibited from having. The depths of scheming and planning that such predatory men are willing to go to is almost unimaginable. Just look at the Catholic priest scandal.

• There have always been teen girls who long to be boys — to escape the burden of objectification they endure. To many, if they were told they really could exempt themselves from the trials of girlhood, they’d leap at the chance.

• There have always been lesbians who long to move through the world free of the everyday grind of homophobia and misogyny they’re subjected to, for simply looking and acting the way they naturally do. If society is not continuing the necessary work to lessen the burden of homophobia that lesbians still endure, some of them might opt to live in a kind of closet instead, by attempting to camouflage themselves as ordinary men through “male” identities, surgeries, and cross-sex hormones.

• There have always been gay boys and young men with naturally feminine attributes, for whom the thought has crossed their minds, “If only I were a beautiful young woman, hunky young men would find me attractive instead of repulsive, and I’d be so much more popular! I’m so ashamed of being gay. I feel like a freak…” If enough of their peers and parents and teachers encouraged them further along this line of thinking, some of them would attempt to “change” their sex.

• There have always been social chasers, people who need to be at the centre of the party, who get unbearable FOMO at the sight of a big glittery rainbow parade that they aren’t leading. Given a chance to “identify” into the parade, they would happily co-opt it and make it all about themselves.

None of these people is innately “transgender”. None of them needs a social or legal “right” to censor everyone’s acknowledgement of their biological sex in order to carry on with their lives — none of them.

In fact, everyone — all of society — is far better off if nobody is legally designated as a separate class of special people entitled to such a “right”.

Automatically granting “trans rights” to some of these groups of people poses an immediate threat to the safety of women and children: making “trans” a no-questions-asked all-access pass to women’s safe spaces plainly does just that.

Granting “trans rights” to other groups — as in the right to legally suppress the fact of someone’s sex from being openly acknowledged or mentioned — undermines women’s rights and gay rights in a variety of other ways, too, some blatantly obvious and others more subtle.

One such pitfall that perhaps doesn’t get the attention I think it deserves is this: the promotion of “transness” as a supposedly “healthy” alternative to gayness or gender non-conformity disincentivizes society from working to lessen the burdens of prejudice that are unfairly carried by “nonconforming” women and gays. As much as the trans movement pulls people into it via incentives, people are also pushed into it by everyone else’s disincentives: everyday people lack the will to truly address the problems of sexism and anti-gay bias that continue to plague the culture. Society’s newfound veneration of “trans” sends a signal to unhappy women and gays that their misfit status is a problem that ought best be solved within themselves if they want to fit into society: it tells them they’re better off modifying themselves and irreversibly damaging their bodies in order to be brought into conformity with the status quo.

This is what the bogus concept of “trans kids” does. It reframes the fact that some boys are naturally feminine and some girls are naturally masculine as a situation to be medically addressed through “gender clinics”, as if medicalizing today’s gender-bending youth will cleanse our past from centuries of homophobia, or something.

It doesn’t logically make any sense, but this topic was never the domain of logic, and instead the domain of gut feelings and tribal anxieties. To most straight people, when they hear the word trans, the first thing that comes to mind is, “How can I get out of this topic as quickly and safely as possible, without being seen as a bigot?” Whereas to a gay man like me, who has suffered from gender dysphoria in my youth, the first thing that comes to mind is, “How can I help these young vulnerable people as much as possible, and how can I ensure their safety?”

I despair, because these supposed “trans rights” are just dragging more people into the maelstrom. It’s threatening to drown us all.

This is a modified and expanded essay based on a comment and guest post I made at Butterflies and Wheels.